If CCL ever gets tired of DJing, they could get into taxonomy, judging by their knack for inventing cheeky genre tags like liquidtime, sexy oven, silica dew, and cowgirl breaks. But they’re probably doing just fine as they are: organizing club nights and parties like subglow in Berlin (where the former Seattlite currently resides) and putting out dubby, moody mixes like A Night in the Skull Discotheque for the T4T LUV NRG label. Apart from this year’s collaborative EP Tilda’s Goat Stare, this is CCL’s first proper solo production. Containing three tracks plus a remix and two edits, the record plunges you into their warped, sweaty haze of hypnagogic, id-melting beats.
The EP is presented as an “ASMR murder mystery,” a theme that plays out in occasional spoken-word fragments. But as a framing device, it’s pretty loose—imagine you’re in a cobwebbed library, except wait, it’s a strobing club—and not particularly indicative of the sounds being explored. Mostly the music consists of reproductions of styles like speed garage and breakbeat 2-step, at times sounding as though they had been beamed straight out of the late ’90s and early aughts. CCL’s haunted delivery of certain lines—especially “Dreams, the original thrill,” on highlight “The Plot Thickens”—sounds like they want to give the vocals the flickering, phantasmal feel of a vintage sample, like the stuttering movie soundbite on KMA Productions’ stark “Cape Fear.”
Rather than rewire these genres or insert unexpected left turns, CCL gives them new layers of both polish and psychedelic clutter. Tracks quiver like gothic piñatas, spilling out astral arps and burbles that pop like goblin borborygmi. “Strange Attractor” unfurls like a full night out, warping from icy ambient to subterranean trance, with clattering breaks folded in as an extra layer of ornament. This is music for the heads, and for DJs who’ll listen to the micro-textures and envy the deft way CCL weaves this buzzing hive of elements without overloading the groove.
Clearly the result of perfectionist tweaking, Plot Twist glides seamlessly between genres, as though walking between club rooms engulfed in fog. At points, the mix begins to melt into a feverish ooze, the club walls collapsing as the drugs hit. “We’re standing in a library,” a voice coos softly like an apparition amid the 2-step stutter of the title track. “I watch you take a book from the shelf. Pages turning softly,” they continue, before the voice echoes and accelerates, sounding almost inhuman. But the tracks never fully dissolve into chaos; CCL’s locked-in grooves keep you from dissociating in the mist. These tracks feel like they’re made to be dancefloor artillery, the kind of deep churners that set the mood, yank people off benches and out of the bathrooms.
The electronic music world is currently in the throes of a wave of revivalism, and it might at first seem like CCL’s recycling of styles most popular two decades ago lines up with that trend. But the DJ-producer shows how to faithfully recreate styles while also making them fresh. Plot Twist dreams up a nebula of bright twinkles and shadowy pulses to lose yourself in until you’re nothing but a tangle of limbs swaying in the dark, thinking of libraries. To use CCLspeak, file under bookwormhole.
